The Shakespeare Programming Language (SPL) is an esoteric programming language designed by Jon Åslund and Karl Hasselström. Like the Chef programming language, it is designed to make programs appear to be something other than programs; in this case, Shakespearean plays.

A character list in the beginning of the program declares a number of stacks, naturally with names like "Romeo" and "Juliet". These characters enter into dialogue with each other in which they manipulate each other's topmost values, push and pop each other, and do I/O. The characters can also ask each other questions which behave as conditional statements. On the whole, the programming model is very similar to assembly language, but more than an order of magnitude more verbose.

Example code

This is part of the standard "Hello World" program in SPL. The statements assign numerical values to the other character, and "Speak your mind" is an order to the other character to output that value as a character.

                    Act II: Behind Hamlet's back.

                    Scene I: Romeo and Juliet's conversation.

[Enter Romeo and Juliet]

Romeo:
 Speak your mind. You are as worried as the sum of yourself and the
 difference between my small smooth hamster and my nose. Speak your
 mind!

Juliet:
 Speak YOUR mind! You are as bad as Hamlet! You are as small as the
 difference between the square of the difference between my little pony
 and your big hairy hound and the cube of your sorry little
 codpiece. Speak your mind!

[Exit Romeo]

See [1] for the full "Hello World" source code

See also

• Beatnik
• Chef
• ETA
• l33t

External links

• Homepage
• SourceForge page
• GCC Frontend (also has fuller language description)